View from the North 40: What the heck, Deirdre

A Maryland woman has proven that, when it comes to Christmas gifts, it’s not the giving that counts — it’s the giving, then taking it back and then cashing it in for $50,000 that really counts.

Unified Payments International reported Dec. 27 that Deirdre Stokes of Maryland bought some scratch-off lottery tickets as Christmas presents and the one that she bought her husband was a $50,000 winner.

She said she only buys tickets around Christmastime to give as little gifts for friends and family. That chance purchase turned out to be an amazingly generous gift, right?

The story caught my attention initially because I bought lottery tickets for myself, my husband and our Christmas guest and we got nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Bupkis (if you don’t mind a little North American Yiddish slang thrown in during a non-Jewish holiday).

In fact, we got so much nothing with our numbers that it seems like we should win something for it.

Between the three tickets we, had 18 numbers, none of which were repeated. Also, none of those numbers matched the six lottery numbers picked that day. This gave us a total of 24 unique, non-matching numbers involved in this game of chance on that day — out of the 69 possible numbers that could have been drawn.

That seems like we beat some kind of odds that should be rewarded.

Sure, maybe it didn’t deserve $50,000 dollars worth of reward, but a couple, three bucks — maybe a C-note, or two — would’ve been a nice Christmas present to compensate for our combined goose-egg of disappointment.

No such thing. Whatever. I guess this column is all about Deirdre anyway.

“I bought several different tickets for gifts,” she said. “It was just random luck that the Super Cash ticket ended up in my husband’s stocking.”

And when I said this is all about Deirdre, I meant ALL about Deirdre.

Because clearly she said it was a gift to her husband, but she then went on to say: “When my husband scratched (the ticket) and said we’d won $50,000, I knew he must be joking or reading the rules incorrectly.”

So here’s Deirdre already staking a claim in the winnings — while calling him a moron. His gift became “we’d won” pretty quick like. No word on what her husband thought about all of this because he wasn’t in the picture at all.

When I say in the picture, I mean that literally because there was a damning photo with the article.

Picture this photo: Ol’ Deirdre is standing there, with a satisfied smile on her face, holding one of those giant fake checks that has her name on it. Not her husband the ticket recipient’s name. Not both of their names. Her name.

Deirdre totally bogarted the gift. Deirdre, and I can’t emphasize this enough, does not understand the meaning of gift giving.

If I were Deirdre’s husband and in charge of her gifts next year, they would all be in my size and my favorite color. And if it’d happened to the real me, when I say “my size and my favorite color” I mean “my size and favorite color of horse,” of course.

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Obviously, I do not understand the meaning of Christmas spirit, but I do understand terms like retribution for theft, and debt owed, at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40.com .